Anna Deavere Smith Quotes
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I call the language of political figures, pundits and administrators 'the haute couture of language.'
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My main concern is theater, and theater does not reflect or mirror society. It has been stingy and selfish, and it has to do better.
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I feel like my work has been my path to freedom from having grown up in a segregated environment.
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Because of the generation in which I came into the world, there were expectations. Of course there were expectations. It was something having to do with being a respectable Negro woman who would make the people in Baltimore proud.
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When I got out of acting school, I was lucky to have gotten any job at all. A lot of people hiring African American actresses - it was right after 'Roots,' and for society, not me, it was great. Nice richly dark-skinned people was the fashion, and I was not.
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I never know when somebody's going to knock on the door of my own unconscious in a way that I wouldn't have anticipated.
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Listening is not just hearing what someone tells you word for word. You have to listen with a heart. I don't want that to sound touchy-feely; it is not. It is very hard work.
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You hang around actors, or dancers, the minute you sneeze, everybody has a remedy, and we're all on a million different kinds of diets, and different kinds of things that we do for exercise.
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Probably the person who said the only color in Los Angeles is green was right.
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I think a lot of L.A. is something like USC - this incredible white culture living in the midst of color, and no obvious reaction to it at all. I mean, they have guards at the gate at USC - guards at the gate of a major university! And the guards chase young black boys away - I've seen it, chasing 8-year-old boys.
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Somehow we can't live outside the politics of race. There's something very deep in all of us, that is taught to us when we are very, very little. Which is the disrespect and fear of the other.
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Artists are the people that no matter what, pick up the pen, pick up a paintbrush. They take the time to translate what is happening to create something that resonates deeply with the rest of the people that are caught in the middle of their own reality.
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I think we need leadership that helps us remember that part of what we are about is caring about more than the person right next to us, but the folks across the way.
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Friendship is a wildly underrated medication.
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Over time, my students have gotten richer and more educated.
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I think as a kid I always liked to listen to people. I loved hearing stories.
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I see myself first and foremost as a student of expression.
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If you think about what acting is supposed to be, my job is to disappear.
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I don't talk a lot when I interview. My job is to get out of the way.
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Identity is an assemblage of constellations.
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I'm interested when things are upside down - because there are so many possibilities in that one moment. There is a lot that is exposed.
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We would like doctors to listen, but the fact is, we better be ready to be able to talk to them. You're going to have to be an active participant in that conversation, so I'd say the American people are going to need ways of stepping up to the conversation.
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That artists are called to be more responsible and 'true' is a tip of hat to their power.
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I see myself as not a typical theater person, but a person who uses the theater as a place to meet people and explore ideas.